Ships is tricky
Jul. 14th, 2017 06:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI am reading lots about wooden sailing ships. It is one of those topics that keeps going until it's about everything.
I spent a chunk of time reading about different things you can make sails with, which isn't data I can imagine a use for personally, but it's all interesting. Sails stretch and rub, as far as I understood, they have technical words for it. You need them to catch a lot of wind without letting it through, but materials can't optimise for everything at once, so you also have to figure out how long they'll last and stuff. UV breaks many things. Many. And laminates are harder to handle, plus what you want it to get the good stuff of all the layers, but if you get it wrong you stack the bads as well. And I started out just wondering what sails were made of and why they're not like a solid thing. I'm not sure I learned exactly, but probably because you need it to make complicated shapes to make the wind make you go.
All of this is minimally useful if I'm AUing a possessed ship where magic makes it go. Maybe spirits like different sorts of fabrics. Maybe a spirit would need sails to make things easier.
I read a bunch of stuff about Really Big Ships before deciding that anything with a crew compliment in the hundreds is more Star Trek than I was really imagining.
The crew thing is tricky though, because I'm not sure it's saying how many people it needs to make it go. Sometimes it's saying how many marines it can take somewhere fast. And it's unlikely to give you a minimum. But sails need sailors.
... unless a magic ship.
Though with GURPS rules where magic is fatigue powered, you'd get quite a lot of power out of living crew, since alive people recharge plenty quickly. Like batteries. ... after the Matrix they'd call each other coppertop until it was uncool again...
I don't know if I want something modern but wooden or something more like a historical reconstruction.
A lot of fantasy books seem to accidentally have very advanced ships, with cabins and all sorts. It seems like cabins, or indeed anywhere to put the humans, weren't a feature for a really long time.
Ships travelling the Banestorm need to be Oz particle resistant to avoid a sort of magical radiation poisoning for the people inside. So they'll either need to be enclosed or have like a faraday cage where you're always behind the magic resistant material. Hmm, silk counts a bit, maybe they have fluttery prayer flags between them and the storm, for emergencies. Hawthorn counts a lot, so you'd want lots of that around the living quarters. But I decided iron counts too much and won't get lifted in the first place, which is why iron and steel ships stopped going to other worlds much, and stormships need to be wood.
... this is a lot of layers of extrapolation from game rules to a story I'm only thinking of writing that will need the game bits mostly filed off...
... but it's just an angle for looking at all the real data.
Like, how much cargo space do they have effects what cargo they even could take between worlds. Multiverse masquerade means no trading in culture unless you can provide a plausible provenance. Books yes, movies no. ... huh, just found an excuse for making a protagonist an English student. But book publishing is, well, tricksy at best. What makes the world hopping worth its keep?
How many people it takes to make it go: Want to keep it Waverider sized, so nine ish, that being how many there's seats for. Or double or triple or quarduple it or shifts, but then you've got several stories happening at once. And on the Waverider they seem to have individual rooms, but with so much space they could easily be shared bunks for other shifts. Well, space easy, people not so easy. But probably keep it to nine people, for an adventure party. And a Gideon to actually make it go.
That's pretty small crew if you translate it to sailors.
So do I want to make it a medievalish AU with a possessed ship in a really old style? Is Gideon a dragon boat? Or do I want a ship from the here now with its engines swapped out for somewhere for the spirit to live?
Luxury cabins and modern construction methods... which would not be optimised for the Storm. Especially if you have to actively avoid iron.
(I realise the Long Earth series did the iron thing too. I'm not trying to be original, we're all playing in the same folklore after all.)
There's ships that were held together with iron nails, which wouldn't suit a magic ship. Could swap it or like titanium or aluminium or something but that's a bit boring. There were ships that were kind of sewn together, but I don't know much about that yet. Modern ships rely on glue, and the strength of fancy modern epoxies, which gets you a whole different set of constraints. There were overlapping or side by side plank constructions, and plugging of gaps with caulking, but with modern tools they can get them super matching and really smooth.
And how important is hiding? Masquerade is a bit hard if you sail into a storm and don't come out... until months later... on the regular. Could you even do that on Earth or would someone be watching you and think you sank?
But to write even a small bit of story on a trade ship I need to know the tech level, how many people to make it go, how much space they'd have to live in, and stuff like bathrooms and eating. ... yes I know almost everything skips the bathrooms but still.
Even a dramatic bit of story where all the humans go below and close the hatches but the ship keeps going
has just implied many things about size and construction and where humans can go.
And it would be way cooler to ride the Banestorm like an exciting bit of Earth weather. I'm sure there's a whole lot of books where people cope with exciting Earth weather but they'd all be new to me. Add some magic, glowing... wait, there's rl glowing, I should look that up... and a whole lot of storm spirits, as well as portals that are more like freaky whirlpools... (was that Once Upon a Time or Pirates of the Caribbean? It'd be cool though.)
Exciting ship adventure or 'we went to hyperdrive and then back again'...
I shall go read more things :-)
I spent a chunk of time reading about different things you can make sails with, which isn't data I can imagine a use for personally, but it's all interesting. Sails stretch and rub, as far as I understood, they have technical words for it. You need them to catch a lot of wind without letting it through, but materials can't optimise for everything at once, so you also have to figure out how long they'll last and stuff. UV breaks many things. Many. And laminates are harder to handle, plus what you want it to get the good stuff of all the layers, but if you get it wrong you stack the bads as well. And I started out just wondering what sails were made of and why they're not like a solid thing. I'm not sure I learned exactly, but probably because you need it to make complicated shapes to make the wind make you go.
All of this is minimally useful if I'm AUing a possessed ship where magic makes it go. Maybe spirits like different sorts of fabrics. Maybe a spirit would need sails to make things easier.
I read a bunch of stuff about Really Big Ships before deciding that anything with a crew compliment in the hundreds is more Star Trek than I was really imagining.
The crew thing is tricky though, because I'm not sure it's saying how many people it needs to make it go. Sometimes it's saying how many marines it can take somewhere fast. And it's unlikely to give you a minimum. But sails need sailors.
... unless a magic ship.
Though with GURPS rules where magic is fatigue powered, you'd get quite a lot of power out of living crew, since alive people recharge plenty quickly. Like batteries. ... after the Matrix they'd call each other coppertop until it was uncool again...
I don't know if I want something modern but wooden or something more like a historical reconstruction.
A lot of fantasy books seem to accidentally have very advanced ships, with cabins and all sorts. It seems like cabins, or indeed anywhere to put the humans, weren't a feature for a really long time.
Ships travelling the Banestorm need to be Oz particle resistant to avoid a sort of magical radiation poisoning for the people inside. So they'll either need to be enclosed or have like a faraday cage where you're always behind the magic resistant material. Hmm, silk counts a bit, maybe they have fluttery prayer flags between them and the storm, for emergencies. Hawthorn counts a lot, so you'd want lots of that around the living quarters. But I decided iron counts too much and won't get lifted in the first place, which is why iron and steel ships stopped going to other worlds much, and stormships need to be wood.
... this is a lot of layers of extrapolation from game rules to a story I'm only thinking of writing that will need the game bits mostly filed off...
... but it's just an angle for looking at all the real data.
Like, how much cargo space do they have effects what cargo they even could take between worlds. Multiverse masquerade means no trading in culture unless you can provide a plausible provenance. Books yes, movies no. ... huh, just found an excuse for making a protagonist an English student. But book publishing is, well, tricksy at best. What makes the world hopping worth its keep?
How many people it takes to make it go: Want to keep it Waverider sized, so nine ish, that being how many there's seats for. Or double or triple or quarduple it or shifts, but then you've got several stories happening at once. And on the Waverider they seem to have individual rooms, but with so much space they could easily be shared bunks for other shifts. Well, space easy, people not so easy. But probably keep it to nine people, for an adventure party. And a Gideon to actually make it go.
That's pretty small crew if you translate it to sailors.
So do I want to make it a medievalish AU with a possessed ship in a really old style? Is Gideon a dragon boat? Or do I want a ship from the here now with its engines swapped out for somewhere for the spirit to live?
Luxury cabins and modern construction methods... which would not be optimised for the Storm. Especially if you have to actively avoid iron.
(I realise the Long Earth series did the iron thing too. I'm not trying to be original, we're all playing in the same folklore after all.)
There's ships that were held together with iron nails, which wouldn't suit a magic ship. Could swap it or like titanium or aluminium or something but that's a bit boring. There were ships that were kind of sewn together, but I don't know much about that yet. Modern ships rely on glue, and the strength of fancy modern epoxies, which gets you a whole different set of constraints. There were overlapping or side by side plank constructions, and plugging of gaps with caulking, but with modern tools they can get them super matching and really smooth.
And how important is hiding? Masquerade is a bit hard if you sail into a storm and don't come out... until months later... on the regular. Could you even do that on Earth or would someone be watching you and think you sank?
But to write even a small bit of story on a trade ship I need to know the tech level, how many people to make it go, how much space they'd have to live in, and stuff like bathrooms and eating. ... yes I know almost everything skips the bathrooms but still.
Even a dramatic bit of story where all the humans go below and close the hatches but the ship keeps going
has just implied many things about size and construction and where humans can go.
And it would be way cooler to ride the Banestorm like an exciting bit of Earth weather. I'm sure there's a whole lot of books where people cope with exciting Earth weather but they'd all be new to me. Add some magic, glowing... wait, there's rl glowing, I should look that up... and a whole lot of storm spirits, as well as portals that are more like freaky whirlpools... (was that Once Upon a Time or Pirates of the Caribbean? It'd be cool though.)
Exciting ship adventure or 'we went to hyperdrive and then back again'...
I shall go read more things :-)
no subject
Date: 2017-07-14 07:59 am (UTC)Sails need to have a 'belly' to catch the wind. Imagine it like this: if you hold something flat and hard under a running tap, say a piece of cardboard or stiff plastic, most of the water would splash or run straight off, there would be very little balanced on the card. Now imagine a soft plastic bag under the same tap - the water runs in and fills the bag. So there is more water inside the bag than just resting on top of the flat card, and a greater weight of water means more 'push'. Under a tap that is gravity pushing downwards, in a sailing ship it is the wind pushing the ship across the surface. Having the sails soft allows for a belly, and the size and shape of that belly can be adjusted depending on exactly what the wind is doing. Most of sailing comes down to careful adjustments of the sails.
Copper bolts were better than iron but expensive. It doesn't rust in sea water like iron.
Only really suitable for small boats, although the ancients made some surprisingly large ones. They aren't really workable in heavy seas because the hull has too much 'play'. Different hull designs were developed for different seas because each sea and ocean has very different characteristics - a ship or boat built for the Mediterranean would not be ideal in the North Sea or Atlantic, and vice versa.
On any war ship the majority of the crew were needed to man the guns. Actually sailing the ship can be done with far fewer. The big Napoleonic ships of the line with a crew of 600+ was basically a huge floating battery of guns, with up to a dozen men required per gun.
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Date: 2017-07-14 08:02 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2017-07-14 09:58 am (UTC)But contrast it with a Napoleonic war ship of about the same size: that would need a crew of about 600-700. HMS Victory had 850.
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Date: 2017-07-14 01:37 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2017-07-14 01:37 pm (UTC)In the 19th century about 25% or more of Manchester's meat and butter was coming from Ireland, and much of the meat was shipped on the hoof. If you're looking at shipping trade the issus needing to be looked at are a) demand at point of delivery; b) cost of supply at point of shipment; c) additional problems getting the stuff to point of shipment; d)any problems with the port of shipment eg freezes in winter, vulnerable to flooding, difficult harbour mouth to negotiate, dries out at low tide, silts up, prone to bad weather etc.
There are a lot of ports round the UK which stopped being commercial ports because the river changed its course, or the size of boats got too big for the harbour mouth, or they were intended to ship coal and the seams ran out.
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Date: 2017-07-14 01:56 pm (UTC)I think this is one of the most beautiful bits of economic research out there: To do with the price of fish
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Date: 2017-07-14 06:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-07-14 11:21 pm (UTC)Modern communication has shaped reader expectation enough to shape stories. Writing someone as unable to communicate feels like making someone drop their phone at a key moment, like it's cheating even when logical.
Magic communications tech would be key to overall tech level.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-14 11:23 pm (UTC)within universes though there's a whole college of magic that I'll have to think on. And maybe messenger guilds, who run like lightning...